Research

What is emotion? Our research addresses that question from
both psychological and neuroscience perspectives, ultimately working toward
a general framework for understanding how the brain creates the mind.

Our Conceptual Act Model
hypothesizes that "anger," "sadness,"
"fear," and similar mental events are not basic building blocks in the
mind, but instead are mental events that result from the interplay of
more basic psychological systems that are not themselves
specific to emotion. Think how basic ingredients like flour, water,
and yeast can combine to make diverse foods that look and taste very
different from one another. Our research suggests that emotions — and
other mental events — are constructed in much the same way from
basic mental ingredients. This is called a psychological construction approach.

We identify four core
systems (core affect,
conceptualization,
language,
and
executive control)
that correspond to large-scale, distributed networks in the brain. These
systems
continually shape one another as they combine — like ingredients
— to make a variety of mental states... only some of which
people call "emotion."

The Conceptual Act Model prescribes a broad, innovative scientific
agenda for the study of emotion. It is grounded, first and foremost,
in a better understanding of these three core systems and their
interaction, with an emphasis on
individual differences
or variability. In addition, it suggests several counterintuitive
hypotheses about the
fundamental role of affect in perception
and the role of language in perception and experience.